I sat in the library on the first day trying to work on my translations but jotting on the blotter the line of my true enquiry. I was sick to the gut with fear. The heavy fear of not seeing her again. I wouldn’t break my word. I wouldn’t go to the phone. I scanned the row of industrious heads. Dark, blonde, grey, bald, wig. A long way round was a bright red flame. I knew it wasn’t Louise but I couldn’t take my eyes off the colour. It soothed me the way any bear will soothe a child not at home. It wasn’t mine but it was like mine. If I made my eyes into narrow slits the red took up the whole room. The dome was lit with red. I felt like a seed in a pomegranate. Some say that the pomegranate was the real apple of Eve, fruit of the womb, I would eat my way into perdition to taste you.

‘I love her what can I do?’

The gentleman in the knitted waistcoat opposite looked up and frowned. I had broken the rule and spoken out loud. Worse, I had spoken to myself. I gathered my books and rushed from the room, past the suspicious gaze of the guards and out down the steps built through the massive columns of the British Museum. I started to walk home, convincing myself that I would never hear from Louise again. She would go to Switzerland with Elgin and have a baby. A year ago Louise had given up her job at Elgin’s request so that they could start a family. She had miscarried once and had no wish to do it again. She told me she was firm about no baby. Did I believe her? She had given the one reason I believe. She said, ‘It might look like Elgin.’

Reason. I was caught in a Piranesi nightmare. The logical paths the proper steps led nowhere. My mind took me up tortuous staircases that opened into doors that opened into nothing. I knew my problem was partly old war wounds playing up. Put in a situation that smelt anything like the one with Bathsheba and I hit out. Bathsheba had always been asking for time to make definite decisions only to come back with a list of compromises. Louise, I knew, wouldn’t make compromises. She would vanish.

Ten years of marriage is a lot of marriage. I can’t be relied upon to describe Elgin properly. More importantly I’d never met the other Elgin, the one she’d married. No-one whom Louise had loved could be worthless, if I believed that I’d have to accept that I might be worthless too. At least I had never pressured her to leave. It would be her own decision.

I had a boyfriend once called Crazy Frank. He had been brought up by midgets although he himself was over six feet tall. He loved his adopted parents and used to carry them one on each shoulder. I met him doing exactly that at a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in Paris. We went to a bar and then on to another bar and got very drunk and while we were in a shot bed in a cheap pension he told me about his passion for miniatures.